by Murray Bail
That irrational movement—arthritic, spasmodic—which disturbed the lines of the city on Friday evenings was nothing to the one which appeared later in the year, in broad daylight. External (that is, observed by the population at large), horizontal and longer-lasting it was accompanied by the metallic strokes of internal combustion. Leaving Uncle Vern's place late one afternoon Holden turned as usual into Magill Road. Head down, exaggerating the illusion of being engulfed by the tidal Hills rising darkly a few yards behind him, Holden quickly reached the point where the pedals of Mercury became hopelessly undergeared—must have been hitting forty-five or fifty—and was aiming to pass a tram, also swaying left and right as if being pedalled, when an olive-green war-disposal motorbike came from behind in a clatter and cut in front of him, leaning like a yacht tacking in a gale, almost clipping the tram's slatted cowcatcher, before leaning the other way in the one graceful motion to avoid colliding with a man and his missus, who'd stepped out to flag down the city-bound tram.
All Holden had glimpsed was a patch of nicotine-coloured hair. Something about the receding rider's splayed elbows opened Holden's eyes; and suddenly he recognised his father's piped trousers. By then the couple were directly in front of his handlebars, and only by swerving violently, his left elbow grazing the jutting breast of the embroidered woman did he avoid piling into them—a rare moment when his face expressed alarm.
Recovering nicely, he began laughing. Not over the close shave, the frozen faces and the man's angry shout, but in anticipation of seeing McBee at home with his precious motorbike.
A new informality showed between Mrs Shadbolt and Frank McBee. They could be quite solemn and matter-of-fact together: a naturalisation ceremony of the kind eventually performed by thousands of post-war migrants.
The naturalness tended (extended) to extremes. Diving under the table retrieving a fork Holden saw the former soldier's trigger hand between his mother's splayed legs. A single blink registered it as clearly as a Leica shutter, and he stayed under a second or two more for the humid image to develop. Emerging red in the face with the effort, as if he'd stayed too long under water, his mother hastily assumed it to be embarrassment and moved away from McBee. But it was when she began adding ‘dear’ like a Christian-name at the end of every other sentence that Holden squirmed. The automation of the intimacy irritated him. He wondered what her feelings were. To Karen though the endearment was natural.
The Shadbolts were now usually into their dessert before McBee came in; ‘tea’ had always been at six and Mrs Shadbolt saw no reason for delaying it. The sound of the motorbike as it turned into their street and accelerated towards them alerted their mother, and Holden, who had an ear for these things, although everybody recognised the distinctive single-cylinder clatter, nodded authoritatively, ‘Here he comes.’ And as the rider changed down through the gears, blipping the throttle quite unnecessarily, their mother ducked out to consult a mirror. Only a brief embrace was allowed as he banged through the screen door. With the post-war reconstruction in full swing McBee wore overalls, his hands and sometimes his cheeks smudged with grease. And his raw energy—whack: ‘Howdy, Holden-boy!’— transformed the house.
After scrubbing his face clean, he sat down and proceeded to methodically chew the chop or steak, removing strands of gristle with his fingers, indicating to Holden not so much simple hunger as this man's unalloyed determination. Between mouthfuls he asked Karen, ‘And what did you get up to today?’ Politely nodding at her finger-twisting recital he then turned to Holden, taking a different line, ‘Did you fell a teacher with a single blow to the head today? How many did you tell to jump in the lake? Let's have it, buster. You're among your mates here. At least you were when I left this morning.’ The more colloquial and exaggerated he became the more they enjoyed it.
As he ate, Mrs Shadbolt watched his veins stand out, and she smiled pointedly at her children during his interrogations.
Only after leaning back and running his tongue over his teeth did he turn to her and almost jump out of his seat with surprise. Karen and Holden had been waiting for it; McBee never let them down. ‘What? You're here too? It's Mrs…’—clicking his fingers and frowning—‘Mrs Whatshername. For the life of me I've forgotten her surname. Normally I'm a tiger for…names. I believe we've met before. It was dark. Remember? My, you're looking nice today. Isn't she now? In broad daylight.’
Out of uniform his open-necked shirt always of the same brown-check spilled out from his slacks and at least one button and shoelace was undone. His red knuckles, oscillating Adam's apple and jaw had become hungry, carbuncular. The energy he brought into the kitchen and the bedroom was tradition-free, larrikin energy. It was expansive, raw, and sometimes dry, as unpredictable as the climate over the perplexing continent.
Holden heard McBee tell their mother he'd hired ‘without doubt the finest and most sought-after signwriter in the state’ to paint her initials, AJS, in resplendent gold leaf on the petrol tank of the machine. And—who would believe?—she swallowed it. Long after he'd sold it and moved onto better things she kept seeing her monogrammed motorbike on the streets in various colours and states of repair; and once when she saw an AJS with a sidecar she felt a pang as if she had given birth to another child.
To Holden, McBee sometimes spoke in riddles. Slapping the machine's foam rubber seat he said quite loudly, ‘She's a good ride. I'll tell you about it one day. She can be a temperamental bitch,’ he added, a joke.
Holden thought McBee had been confiding in him. Looking up he saw his mother with hands on her hips. ‘I heard that,’ she said. But smiling slightly she had eyes only for McBee.
Squatting beside him Holden developed his mechanical mind. For McBee seemed to enjoy dismantling the Amal carburettor, adjusting its needle. He fiddled with the magneto. They threw away the air cleaner. The spark plug was reverently handed to Holden to clean, and using a shirt soaked in petrol he polished the alloy crankcase until it mirrored his solemn face.
And McBee and the boy became a common sight around the streets of Burnside, Payneham, Norwood. Accelerating up Magill Road after tea the motorcycle's four-stroke engine imitated the sound of tearing trousers, and as the succession of shaded streets fell away left and right, the expanse of pale countryside and rising hills opened up before them in a vast zipper-action. Holden embraced the man in the foetal crouch, leaning when he leaned. Braking heavily he merged into the broad back. Briefly then they were one, their eyes slitted like our Asian friends. It encouraged in Holden a false feeling of equality.
‘Where do you go all day?’ he wanted to know. ‘Is it your job? Can I come one day?’
The scattered remnants of the world war included of course a surplus (there's a mercantile term) of khaki trousers and epauletted shirts, and tons of ammunition boxes with the rope handles going cheap. There was a glut of rucksacks and canvas belts which matched the complexion of the jaundiced survivors of Burma and the Islands, while tarpaulins and tents used now for picnics had the dusty greens of the box-hedges. It would be years before the regulation boots wore out in the trenches of homesites, or along the borders of invisible gardens, just as the veterans of Crete and the Western Desert would take almost as long to stop ducking their heads at the distant explosions from the quarry in the Hills overlooking the city.
The dry colours of this surplus material had been carefully manufactured for its camouflage qualities—its closeness to earth. Now in peacetime it introduced a layer of melancholy to the city. Khaki was a hardworking colour, the defender of plain virtues. It was a declaration of practicality, of post-war rebuilding and repopulation. Nothing frivolous about khaki. It's all over Africa and the colonies like a plague. The word itself has been handed down from the Hindustani. Is it worn much by affluent, already-made societies? There's scarcely a square metre of the stuff in Sweden or Switzerland.
The most eyecatching relics of war were the rearing fuselages of stranded Avro Ansons. From the back of the AJS Holden spotted them behind blur
red hedges or protruding in backyards, and in an otherwise ordinary street off Payneham Road a Mustang fighter had managed a perfect pancake landing on a lawn tennis court. Stripped of wings and disgorging the instrument panel and intestines of plaited wiring, these great machines announced an agony of impotence: the war was well and truly over, kaput.
Between them Holden and Frank McBee knew the location of most of the aircraft in Adelaide; a small city, easily traversed. But if McBee had a special interest he wasn't letting on. He crouched over the rattling motorbike.
In those days aluminium was as exotic and as expensive as poultry at Christmas. Its light weight and dull shine fascinated Holden. And the aluminium accounted for only a small part of an aeroplane's technology. It had the instruments and the hydraulics, and riveted struts and pedals drilled to reduce weight had a refined engineering-sculptural quality. Whenever he sighted one of those partially stripped planes Holden envied the gaunt handyman in weekend overalls who'd had the foresight to acquire it.
‘You know my Uncle Vern, he reckons you can get an Avro Anson for £140.’
‘Is he looking for one? Does he want to buy one?’
Holden shook his head, ‘He's interested in other things.’
‘I don't know the man. He's on your mother's side, right?’
‘Her brother,’ Holden nodded solemnly. ‘And he's good. You can ask him about anything under the sun.’
‘What, he knows everything, does he? You can't catch him out?’
‘He works at the Advertiser.’
McBee made a brief arse-wiping movement. ‘That's all the newspapers are good for.’
The boy had to laugh.
‘Anyway,’ Holden returned to his pet subject, ‘where do all the old planes come from? These ones that we see?’
Lighting a cigarette McBee flicked the match away.
And that afternoon Holden was taken on a longer, deliberate ride out of the city. They parted a furrow through a corridor of waist-high grasses which swayed and rippled in the turbulence. When the road shifted a few points towards the setting sun the bleached paddocks, the low hills to the right, and even the trunks of occasional gum trees were overrun by a lava of blinding orange. All this Holden saw with his head to one side. He followed the rapidly receding perspective of stalks, fractured densities and fencing endlessly repeating itself. At set intervals the darker verticals of telegraph poles made abrupt exclamations, and he watched the shadow of himself hunched on the elongated insect-machine advancing rhythmically and retreating.
The aerodrome serving Adelaide was at a place called Para-field (as in ‘parachute’ and ‘paratrooper’ the aircraft industry resorted to the prefix, testifying to the artificiality of human flight). Holden had glimpsed the first windsock as McBee turned right. The motorbike bumped along a dusty track away from the aerodrome. Holden hopped off to unhook an agricultural gate; McBee accelerated away leaving him standing there.
Through a screen of trees he saw a small paddock crammed full of aluminium aeroplanes: DC3s mostly, a few wingless Wirraways and Ansons. As he ran towards them a Sutherland flying boat came into view, moored like an exhausted silver duck in the khaki waters of the dam. And above it crows and hawks circled thermally.
Holden had never seen a graveyard of planes. They were arranged more or less into cemetery rows. Perspex noses and scratched alloy surfaces glittered at the foot of drought-stricken hills. And there was no doubt the RAAF circular markings endowed them with heroic histories; being grounded only added to the poignancy.
No such feelings afflicted McBee.
Throughout the late 1940s there were two prevailing caricatures of dealers in scrap.
First, the greying old boy behind the desk sporting the striped tie; bought and sold the surplus aircraft on the advice of others, along with pig iron, railway sleepers and wheat crops; all sight unseen, over the telephone. Clean fingernails: scrap metal being only a recent and temporary segment of his turnover. A slow-moving, sedentary operator. Time was always on his side. When General Motors set up manufacturing in South Australia he'd put up risk capital for small suppliers (the foundry churning out the rear-vision mirrors, for example). His sons were chinless wonders given to lairising around the streets in British sports cars. The second and more common archetype wore filthy overalls, shorts and army boots. His office was a corrugated iron shed or nothing at all. No telephone. Deals were completed on the personal level with a handshake and tenners stuffed into a hip pocket. Beginning with an Avro Anson bought with back-pay he personally removed easily saleable items—landing lights, sheets of aluminium, the bucket seats—and then the other less accessible parts. The huge radial motors were pulled down to isolate the block of aluminium alloy. About halfway stripped, the hulk had paid for itself. Then onto the next. Turnover became the trick. An aeroplane rarely left his hands intact. A lotta hard work. Often they dabbled in digger spades and enamel plates on the side. But at least you didn't answer to a boss. Such a dealer in scrap had grazed shins, stubborn eyes; a face already half worn out.
The former group represented preservation and accumulation, movement of capital: essentially conservatism; the second specialising in dismantling and dissemination, piecemeal exchange, was more visible, physically active, democratic.
Frank McBee belonged to the…probably the second category.
Not all the aircraft belonged to him; part of the paddock he leased to the first category of merchant. ‘I swap their planes around,’ he explained with a wink. ‘They wouldn't know the bloody difference.’
Most dealers began with an Anson—plenty of non-ferrous scrap, and they were the cheapest. McBee had a lucky break. Through a contact he heard about a Spitfire. ‘Not as much metal, but crikey, I'm a romantic. Look how they performed in the Battle of Britain.’ On the day it was delivered a speedboat enthusiast bought the supercharged engine. He had his own personal mechanic lift it out. ‘I then thought: no, bugger it, I can pick up an Anson anytime.’ Instead he turned to the DC3—the old Gooneybird. These went for four times the cost of the Anson. McBee bought two on credit. The Spitfire shell he meanwhile sold to a German in the Barossa Valley. Took out options on another two DC3s. Small airlines were springing up in Australia and all through the Pacific basin. They needed spare parts. McBee quickly sold the propellers, flaps, balloon tyres and hydraulic systems; Air New Guinea became a regular client of undercarriages. Anything left was sold for scrap. At one stage he had thirteen DC3s. By then he owned the paddock, freehold, and branched out into Ansons, Wirraways and plywood flying boats.
‘This is a great country of ours,’ he said with a simple but expansive gesture. ‘Thank Christ the Japs didn't come down and take us.’
The land remained silent. The sky had darkened to a fuselage grey pierced by a full moon, a single flared cannon hole letting in light.
‘What happened to the speedboat driver?’
McBee gave a short laugh. ‘Don't you read the papers? This was a few weeks back. The idiot was trying to break the Australian water speed record. He broke his neck instead. His boat turned turtle at over a hundred. They're only made of plywood. I got one of the boys to make up a kind of wreath out of a few exhaust pipes, and the man's wife, not a bad-looking tart, was so touched, or chewed up, one or the other, she let me have the engine for nix. If I fished it out. That was easy enough. And you know what? I sold it while it was still dripping saltwater to an ex-RAF type who's getting the whole thing chrome-plated and mounted in his loungeroom. It takes all types.’
Looking around at the extent of the paddock Holden could see McBee was different from everybody else. And with his face partially cast in shadow he now looked especially able, a man who wore the burden of complicated components and high numbers lightly. Towards Holden he had always been friendly and yet remote. And that was how it should be. It was only natural, Holden decided. These numbered among Holden's happiest days. Many years later the sight of deserted aircraft on a tarmac, especially at the close of a tropical day wh
en the windscreens turned into panels of mica, never failed to remind him of the dusty paddock near Parafield, and even brought a slight smile to his face.
For after that first visit he became McBee's assistant. Like many national heroes McBee had an aversion to being alone.
They rattled out on the A-J, Siamese twins suffering curvature of the spine. With his forehead pressed almost daily against the billowing back, flecks of khaki from the passing landscape and McBee's war-disposal shorts entered Holden's pupils and remained: wind-conditioned eyes, marbled khaki. At the paddock McBee hop-hopped into his ex-RAAF overalls (zippers, map-pockets, flaps…), already casting around for the most immediate task. Plenty of times Holden climbed into a cockpit— ‘Pancake to Four O'Clock. Over’—but soon returned to his position at the boss's elbow, igniting the oxy torch with McBee's temperamental Zippo, handing him spanners, helping him undo the nuts on Merlin rocket-covers—that sort of thing.
The complexities of identical aircraft constantly posed a different set of problems. Nothing remained static. A part was always being dismantled or swapped, reducing the whole. The great powerhouses of frame and solid metal laced with wire, piping, clips and cable, the sleeves and brackets of many different sizes, and the hundreds of watch-like screws and nuts engrossed the two of them. There was always something to do, always something to look forward to. And as Holden studied McBee's neck as he strained and swore, unbolting a stubborn supercharger, he was bathed in a kind of liquid gratitude.
Wiping his hands at the end of a long day, and kick-starting for the return home, McBee often got it into his head to suddenly slalom, just for the hell of it, through the formation of Dakotas and Ansons and, in late 1946, an American Liberator—‘There's a rare bird for you’—with Holden gripping his waist, until they lost control one night, clipped the propeller of a Mustang and somersaulted, and McBee practised his ratbaggery alone. As it grew dark the hills several hundred yards away became silhouetted, as did the patient shapes of the planes in cold gun-metal against the sky, standing on angular undercarriages of polished bones. Without lights McBee made a point of riding faster and faster. Holden followed his progress through sound and imagination, sometimes deceived by a backfire of bluish flame. In another little game, McBee on AJS motorbike gave the boy a ten-second start and then hunted him down in the style perfected by the SS. Unfortunately it revealed the former corporal's worst qualities—his ruthlessness, for example—and Holden felt hurt when he was caught and then repeatedly run over by his otherwise generous friend.
